A Triumph For People Power Everywhere

Remember to vote for Jamie Driscoll by pen, and not using the erasable pencil provided. If you doubt that, then consider that five of the seven local authorities are controlled, and that all seven are heavily staffed, by the Labour Right of which writes Aaron Bastani, but don’t let that put you off:

If a generative AI were to create a CV for the ideal Labour politician it would look something like Jamie Driscoll’s. He grew up in a poor part of Middlesborough, and now has two children and a wife who is an NHS GP. His brother served in the Royal Navy, while his dad drove a tank in the British Army — before later working for ICI near the River Tees.

Far from the frenetic world of Westminster, where political wannabes jump straight from studying PPE to become political advisers and, later, Parliamentary candidates, Driscoll was an engineer who didn’t enter elected politics until the age of 48. In 2018, having briefly served as a local councillor, Driscoll won the Labour nomination to stand as the party’s candidate in the race to become the Mayor for the North of Tyne. A year later he won.

Now though, ahead of today’s local election, Driscoll, acclaimed by the Economist in 2021 as “Britain’s most powerful Corbynista”, has become an extremely dangerous opponent for Keir Starmer’s Labour. After appearing on a platform with the director Ken Loach, Driscoll was last year blocked from standing to be the party’s mayoral candidate for the much expanded North East metro area. As a result, Kim McGuinness — the leadership’s favoured candidate — enjoyed a coronation for the nomination. In contrast to Driscoll’s background in business and engineering, McGuinness’s path to public office has seen her work recently in that most absurd of political non-jobs: police and crime commissioner.

Following that treatment, which was condemned by leading Labour figures such as Andy Burnham, Driscoll announced his resignation from Labour — and his desire to stand as an independent for the North East mayoralty. Within weeks he successfully crowdfunded almost six times his target sum of £25,000.

While Driscoll was expected to be competitive, few foresaw that he might actually win. And yet polling from last weekend by More in Common showed Driscoll just two points behind McGuinness — an especially impressive statistic given Labour’s gargantuan polling numbers for Westminster.

That news has proven to be a useful resource for Driscoll and his activists in the final days of campaigning. In recent months they would often meet with the refrain that while a voter might prefer their man to McGuinness, they didn’t want to let in the Tories (a favoured line in the perennial anti-politics of the Labour party). Now, however, voters know it’s a two-horse race between the London-backed Labour candidate and the man Starmer expelled.

But what would it mean if, increasingly plausibly, Driscoll won? Firstly, it would represent a rejection of Starmer’s genre of localism — namely that he will “give power away” by creating more local mayors, while permitting his cronies to stitch up selections. This is, after all, the worst of all worlds: rather than empowering local communities, it simply means the proliferation of non-jobs for a bloated rabble of talent-free apparatchiks.

More than that, a Driscoll win would demonstrate that there are significant downsides to how Starmer and the Labour Right think about politics. Treating those outside your circle as expendable, and labelling them as bigoted when politically expedient, should have costs. So far, it hasn’t.

The national media has largely overlooked the race for the North East but a lot is riding on it — not least the point of devolution in England. Is it designed to serve voters, or the permanent political class in London, who would continue to make decisions only under a phoney localist imprint?

A Driscoll win would be a triumph for people power everywhere, while perhaps curtailing the most venal, authoritarian impulses of the Labour Right — especially important as the establishment tries to put the populist genie of the last decade back in the bottle. In a serious country, Driscoll would be considered a “centrist dad”. But Britain in the 2020s, as we already know, is anything but serious.

If he wins, it will send a massive signal to the national party: that there can, and should, be downsides to treating local people so appallingly. It would also underscore that Starmer has no interest in taking power out of Westminster. He wants the same clique to rule — just under the palatable guise of “localism”.